A Sick Kid

Millie officially has her first cold.  

Who knew a cold could be so heartbreaking.  And by heartbreaking, I mean for me.  Millie herself seems to be handling this cold, and accompanying cough, like a champ.  We took little Millie in to the doctor, who told us that, yes, she was indeed sick and, no, she did not have some terrible infection (which is what I confessed to him that I had convinced myself that she had).  This motherhood thing, I tell you, can drive a person completely insane.  With each new cold symptom, I managed to convince myself that Millie was suffering from some other terrible disease.  Of course, in my mind, there was no way it was just a cold.  I used to think I was a pretty rational person, and then I became a mother.  And now, every ounce of rational thinking seems to have left my body.  

I do have to say though that these are the moments that make me really feel like a mother.  There have been many days, when Millie was her usual happy self, that I didn't really feel much like a mother.  I felt more like a babysitter just doing the fun stuff with Millie.  Playing with her, feeding her, showing her things about the world.  And while every fiber of my being knew I was her mother, I didn't always feel it the way I thought I would.  

But then she got sick.  And she would only sleep if I held her.  And she kept waking herself up in the middle of the night when she couldn't breathe well and one of us would rock her back to sleep.  And she was unhappy the majority of the day.  And all these things really made me feel like her mom.  I am not saying that taking care of a sick baby is loads of fun, but it makes this all feel so real and I think I have been craving that ever since we brought Millie home. 

I remember having a really vivid dream one night after we first brought Millie home.  In my dream, we were ready to give up on the adoption process because it was just too hard.  I remember crying in my dream and feeling like I had to accept that we wouldn't have a baby.  And then I woke up, and Millie was right there with us in the room.  I had to calm myself down and remind myself that we had our most perfect baby.  We were done waiting.  I had to remind myself that we weren't waiting anymore. And in a way, helping little Millie through her first cold is making it so that I don't have to remind myself quite as much.  And that is a wonderful feeling.  

A few days before Millie got sick, we bought her a new toy that had loads of black and white things to look at.  She has been particularly intrigued as of late with black and white polka dots.  They make her inexplicably happy.  So I will leave this post with a video of her looking at her new toy and being inexplicably happy.